The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
Computer services, applications and systems that are configured to display large numbers of graphical images to large numbers of client computers must offer high performance in order to deliver the best user experience. For example, certain kinds of audiovisual program services are configured to display graphical images representing movies, TV shows, or other items that are available for viewing. When these services offer thousands of items, and have millions of subscribers, efficient techniques for delivering millions of copies of the graphical images to client computers are needed.
A related problem involves displaying electronic documents, web pages or other graphical content that include text formed using stored graphical elements termed glyphs. A glyph may be a character or pictogram of an alphabet or character set that can be used to form words, phrases or sentences. Although the total number of glyphs is typically small—for example, a standard Roman alphabet has 26 letters that may correspond to 26 glyphs—online systems of the type described above may need to deliver particular glyphs millions of times to different clients as part of computer displays that the systems generate. Thus, there is a need for techniques to efficiently deliver glyphs from computer storage to the display units of the client computers.